Wife & Mother

I called Mom from the kitchen the other morning while doing four things concurrently—telling her about the weekend, emptying the sink of dishes, washing towels and bedsheets, and making a grocery list. I was also thinking about how I needed to water the garden, make the bed, and take out the compost bucket. Mom herself was parked outside the grocery store, with, I’m sure, forty more things to do than I, and we visited this way for nearly an hour.

There’s a kindredness I feel with Mom now that I’m married that I didn’t expect, especially since moving over the Ozark Mountains, 300 miles away from where I grew up. I go about my new life, wearing the apron of a new wife (because if I don’t, I will ruin my shirt by 10am), and I find myself moving through my home the way Mom did—understanding for the first time why she did things that way, and how much work there really is to do, and how dadgum fun it all is. 

There are lots of meals to cook as a pastor’s wife. Potlucks and Wednesday fellowships and new babies born. This morning, as I cut potatoes for two crockpots of soup, I remembered how Mom would be up while it was still dark on Sunday morning, chopping onions in her pajamas, the kitchen already smelling of meat and broth. I stood at the counter in my PJ’s today, my hair falling out of a braid I slept in, and I thought about how wifehood doesn’t always look how I imagined it would (baking sourdough in a summer dress, for example), but how well my mom embraced and understood the modesty of it. Cooking in my PJ’s this morning, I was thankful for her unassuming humility. 

One day when I was younger, I found myself looking down the line of women’s hands on a table. There were lots of painted nails and diamond rings. And then there was Mom, who never had a thing for nail polish, and whose hands just looked a little more used. I remember thinking, I want my hands to look like that. They were hands that had been burned on the oven door and sliced by paring knives. They’d planted and washed things. The other day, I sliced my fingertip clean open on a brand new kitchen knife and wore it like a badge of honor, a mark made in the act of love. I thought of Mom.

A few months back, I was talking with another writer who said she’ll sometimes take walks through the cemetery and read all the names. You can find some wonderful ones there, like Mickey May. She stopped when she came across a simple stone that gave a woman’s name. Underneath, the epitaph read, Wife & Mother. 

So much said in so few words, my friend pointed out. Maybe she had other responsibilities in life—churchgoer, city councilwoman, cancer survivor—yet she was remembered for what God had designed her best to do, and fine with nothing more. 

I think of Peter, who began his epistle by identifying himself as:

“Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ.”

I wonder what imposing dragons must have crouched in the corners of the room as he wrote that, hissing at him to put something different:

Peter, denier of Jesus Christ.

Peter, rebuked by Jesus Christ.

Or even to identify himself with the thing he did do pretty well:

Peter, caught 153 with Jesus Christ.

But something happens to us when we die beneath the great ocean tide of Christ’s blood, doesn’t it? Anything we’ve done in ourselves—both the regrettable and the good—gets carried away on the tide, and we’re left with the pure and plain identity of what Christ has put before us:

Disciple and apostle. Wife and mother. 

These kinds of mothers surround me. I don’t just have a mom, but a new mother-in-law, sisters, sisters through marriage, and wives and mamas in the local church who are like trees in a forest, standing quiet and faithful—who know that even if a tree falls and no one is around to see it, the Lord does, and it matters. My mom has always been content to just buy the groceries, wash the sheets, and dice the onions, all for the people right around her table. She’s content in the identity Christ has given her, and as a new wife, I can’t help but think, I want my hands to look like that.

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